We performed a comparison between FlexPod XCS and HPE SimpliVity based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Converged Infrastructure."For the management side of our UCS, it is a single pane of glass for multiple people, whether it is data center, sysadmin, or server deployment."
"It is innovative when it comes to compute, storage, and networking, because there are a lot of the storage efficiencies which allow us to keep a smaller footprint."
"We got the product and we have a small environment, but it was able to be scalable to when we started to grow."
"The data is available, compressed, and deduped."
"It's a kind of one-stop shop as far as support goes."
"The ease of expansion is the most valuable feature."
"The solution suits converged infrastructures, where the customer gets a complete system with Cisco servers, NetApp Storage, and Cisco switches."
"The storage efficiency and performance are valuable."
"Having one management console to do everything from was a great improvement over dealing with separate hardware for servers, SANs, backups etc."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"I like HPE SimpliVity's hard disk compression capabilities. The data is compressed into very little space or volume. I think that the principal value of HP SimpliVity is its capacity to compress the data, and I'm saving a lot of disk space using SimpliVity."
"The globally federated architecture means that the backup across sites does not consume precious MPLS bandwidth, which is cool."
"Technical support is perfect. They explain to us the solution in a very clear and simple way. When we call them, they know the right answer and get the right person automatically."
"I like SimpliVity because it can be adapted for small clients or the biggest ones. It's flexible."
"The solution has integrated backup features that are useful."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is the backup recovery."
"I would like to see the following: Support for multiple vendors' hardware; support for SAN with Cisco 9000 switches; automated deployment and configuration with respect to CVD."
"A piece where FlexPod has come up short in the past and an area for them to improve upon: single pane of glass management and single pane of glass upgrade process."
"The ability to manage the templates across sites. We would like to easily take out the configuration of one FlexPod and copy it over, just making minor changes. There is a way to do it, but it's clumsy."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation. I understanding how things are coming together and a lot of that is from the UCS side."
"With the UCS X-Series, I would like to see the fabric interconnects in the chassis. Instead of hanging out so the chassis is 7U, you are increasing your footprint to 9U with the fabric enhancer, where some of the competing solutions are 7U and have collapsed that network fabric into the chassis. This is another thing that I would like to see from Cisco, though not really on the NetApp side since that is pretty solid."
"I would like to have the installation of the top virtualization on its own rather than doing it through the admin. For example, if FlexPod is configured after the configuration of the host, the ESXi is installed also, but it should be part of it rather than doing it as a separate system."
"Both NetApp and Cisco need to do improvements in their day-to-day operations management upgrades."
"Some of the define features could use improvement."
"The product is expensive."
"I would like to see it be a truly hybrid-cloud solution where I could take my on-prem SimpliVity environment and have replication to a cloud install."
"The solution could have an optimization site."
"The backup and recovery process needs to be faster. Right now, it's a bit slow."
"In the next release of the solution, they should make updating the solution easier. Currently, we have HPE doing it for us but I would like to be able to do it."
"I would like them to add more connection capability, a hub and spoke model, to improve the number of connections that it can handle."
"Once you select the size of SimpliVity, it could be risky for you to downsize it because you may need maybe to reimplement some things."
"HPE could give us more options for server models to chose when using the product. Right now, we can only use the DL380."
FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews while HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 149 reviews. FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6, while HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, Oracle Exadata, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail and Dell VxBlock System, whereas HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Dell PowerFlex.
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